Simply put, location changes everything. This one input—our coordinates—has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go—they all change once we merge location and the Web.

Interesting Wired article on Geotagging and photographs. Shows the potentially creepy side of stalking throught the net using geotagged flickr photos!

location, location, location
location awareness needn't be invasive or creepy. But it can be isolating.

To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user's photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.

If you're not concerned about privacy in the age of the Internet yet, you should. Don't want to take my word for it? Then read this.

What information is available about you in cyberspace? Where does it come from, and what risks does it present? Computerworld's Robert L. Mitchell set out to see just how much he could find about himself online. What he discovered is frightening.

The web is fast becoming the collective knowledge base of all of humanity, for better or for worse.

What is whspr!?
Need to receive a message by email, but can't (or don't want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.

Need to receive a message by email, but can't (or don't want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.

Get Emails Without Revealing Your Email Address
Need to receive a message by email, but can't (or don't want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.
So what?
Here's an example: Say you want to advertise a job opening on Twitter, and you don't want to share your company email address. Some applicants may not want to post a public @reply, and they can't send you a direct message if you don't already follow them. Include a whspr! URL, and they can reach you discreetly.

Oh no! Your mom just joined Facebook and what's even worse, she wants to be your friend. More and more people are finding themselves in this situation today and unsure of what to do. Friending mom and dad, the boss, or other work colleagues opens up the details of your private life for the whole world to see - and you might not be entirely comfortable with that. What's to be done?

There are many websites that search standard social networks like MySpace or Facebook, but Piple is one resource that conducts a “deep web” dig for the name you’re looking for on “non-typical sites.” The search results from Piple are pretty impressive. Y

the private world of yesterday is now an online world with open access to social networks, government databases, and public records.

Using data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, the ACLU has determined that nearly 2/3 of the entire US population (197.4 million people) live within 100 miles of the US land and coastal borders. The government is assuming extraordinary powers to stop and search individuals within this zone.

I live within 100 miles of the coastal border and "the government is assuming extraordinary powers to stop and search individuals within this zone." I don't have constitutional rights. ...Wait, what?

At the conference, Facebook asked a range of questions to its users around the world, before feeding the answers back to delegates within minutes. It selectively-targeted users in Palestine and then Israel with the same question about global peace, before debating the results at a discussion forum. It also asked 120,000 US members whether US President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package would be enough to save the US economy. Almost 60pc said it would not.

Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world's largest market research databases.
In an attempt to finally monetise the social networking site... it will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products. Companies will be able to pose questions to specially selected members based on such intimate details as whether they are single or married and even whether they are gay or straight.

Market research company eMarketer recently cut its estimate of advertising spending on the social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, this year by £351m to £912m. It said US advertising spending on Facebook
will fall by 20pc to £147m

If you're not ready to expose everything about you to anyone who asks to be your online friend, it's time you learned how to use Facebook's friend lists.

How to keep stuff you want open open and stuff you want secret secret. Includes discussion of Facebook's own advice about it.

This is interesting because social networking is not just about staying in touch. We now selectively chose who to communicate with as well as who can communicate with us and how much they can know about us.

I get this: "The more I upload the details of my existence, even in the form of random observations and casual location updates, the more I worry about giving away too much. It's one thing to share intimacies person-to-person. But with a community? Creepy."

Erwischt!?

Wired magazine article ... another in the line of stories about social media burnout and why/if it is really worthwhile.

A great article on the incredible potential (and scary pitfalls) of broadcasting your location at all times. Including some really interesting discussion of the way our social contexts haven't really caught up (e.g. people thinking he was lonely or depressed and yearning for company).

Change in Facebook's Terms of Service: In short, all of the content you’ve ever uploaded on Facebook can be used, modified or even sublicensed by Facebook in every possible way - even if you quit the service.

Ever tried to leave Facebook and found out they only allow you to "deactivate" your account? All your personal data, including photos, interests, friends etc will still be saved indefinitely! You don’t have to be a conspiracist to find this quite fishy (or simply annoying)!
Look further down for instructions on how to get your account permanently deleted.

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

On Friday night a technology blog called Techcrunch posted a vicious and completely false rumour about us: that Last.fm handed data to the RIAA so they could track who’s been listening to the “leaked” U2 album.
I denied it vehemently on the Techcrunch article, as did several other Last.fm staffers. We denied it in the Last.fm forums, on twitter, via email – basically we denied it to anyone that would listen, and now we’re denying it on our blog.
According to Ars Technica, even the RIAA don’t know where the rumour came from. The Ars Technica article is worth a read by the way, as it explains how the album was leaked in the first place by U2’s record label.
All the data and technical side of Last.fm is hosted in London and run by the team here. We keep a close eye on what data mining jobs we run, not because we’re paranoid the RIAA is trying to infiltrate us, but because time on our Hadoop Cluster (where the data lives) is so precious and we have lots of important jobs that run every

Wow! Last.fm pwns TC

The hacks at Tech Crunch post a rumor whose source neither Last.fm nor the RIAA know about. Congrats, chumps, you're sending the digital journalism community back several years with every post.

Best rebuttal ever.

I quit reading TC at least 18 months ago. As Rogers Cadenhead said, they're obsessed with first rather than right.

An ordinary deleting of files isn't enough! When you wish to delete any sensitive information, like industrial secrets or some unwanted content, you want to be sure that it will be deleted permanently. Sorry to say, there is a plenty of software recovery tools that can restore your deleted items. If you need to destroy any data and eliminate any possibility of its restoration you need a "shredder". This software destroys the data you choose before the deletion, using a complicated procedure of filling the actual content with random data.

"Google doesn't forget." Could be useful in further discussing (with kids) the implications of this...

Seth's Blog: Personal

A quick lesson on dirt laundry

Seth makes some great points about life in these modern times. Great to share with students, very concise.

"Google never forgets."/ "Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you're on Candid Camera, because you are."

家政婦で面接者をGoogleで検索。ひどい3人

people would be wise to recognize that there is no privacy in the online world - be aware that what you say and write in facebook or the like will be 'googlable' for years - operate accordingly - this is a version of big brother that george orwell didn't necessarily think of but certainly exists - in fact, there is no 'one big brother' - everyone can be big brother with google and the death of privacy due to social computing

oh my god, okay, you have no idea how long I've dreamed of having this.

"Spence, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, is not content with having one blind eye. He wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic, giving him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around."

Filmaker with eye-embedded camera raises privacy concerns

Rob Spence looks you straight in the eye when he talks. So it's a little unnerving to imagine that soon one of his hazel-green eyes will have a tiny wireless

(your name) is blacked out: Stand up against "Guilt Upon Accusation" for New Zealand http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html

What an insane law. I sure hope this doesn't go into effect.

The New Zealand Internet Blackout protests against the Guilt Upon Accusation law 'Section 92A' that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny. This is due to come into effect on February 28th unless immediate action is taken by the National Party.

Think it's bad in AU with our new censorship filter party? Over in NZ, any accusation of copyright infringement could lead to disconnection. "The New Zealand Internet Blackout protests against the Guilt Upon Accusation law 'Section 92A' that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny."

TabRenamizer and Page Title Eraser - Do your tabs give you away? Why not change their names with TabRenamizer or remove the names all together with Page Title Eraser? Both these addons let you play with the tab titles so that you can change them according to your will.

With this browser plugin you can permanently opt out of the DoubleClick cookie, which is an advertising cookie that Google uses.

Save your opt-out preference permanently
With this browser plugin you can permanently opt out of the DoubleClick cookie, which is an advertising cookie that Google uses.

With this browser plugin you can permanently opt out of the DoubleClick cookie, which is an advertising cookie that Google uses.
The plugin lets you keep your opt-out status for this browser even when you clear all cookies.

"To address this threat, we propose a new privacy-preserving layer for P2P systems that obfuscates user-generated network behavior. We show that a user can achieve plausible deniability by simply adding a small percent (between 25 and 50%) of additional random connections that are statistically indistinguishable from natural ones. Based on this result, we designed SwarmScreen, a system that generates such connections by participating in randomly selected torrents without appearing suspicious.
Our SwarmScreen plugin, which seamlessly installs into the Vuze/Azureus BitTorrent client, can be downloaded from >>>here<<<."

April 7th, 2009
Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF's litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration's made two deeply troubling arguments.

The program offers people control over their search appearance only in as much as they are willing to give Google more information about themselves. Google's Joe Kraus explained to us that up to four Google Profiles will appear at the bottom of a results page.

"Cardinal Richelieu famously said: 'If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.' When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply."

Schneier says privacy is quickly disappearing and we're ignoring it. It's like pollution at the beginning of the century: we're ignoring it now because it's small but soon we'll realize it was a big problem that should have been nipped in the bud. Also, if every conversation is recorded we have to change our standards accordingly; eg: how information is considered in a court.

"Society works precisely because conversation is ephemeral; because people forget, and because people don't have to justify every word they utter. ... Privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it's a basic right that has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our humanity. ... Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future generations will look back at us – living in the early decades of the information age – and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data.
We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our grandchildren will be proud of."

Beautiful essay by Bruce Schneier on the challenges of our time due to data collection, the "pollution" of the information age. Tweeted by Thomas Kriese.

"Cardinal Richelieu famously said: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply."
This is especially important for those who say that they have nothing to hide. That misses the point.

Welcome to the future, where everything about you is saved. A future where your actions are recorded, your movements are tracked, and your conversations are no longer ephemeral. A future brought to you not by some 1984-like dystopia, but by the natural tendencies of computers to produce data.
Data is the pollution of the information age. It's a natural byproduct of every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it's disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after effects are toxic.
And just as 100 years ago people ignored pollution in our rush to build the Industrial Age, today we're ignoring data in our rush to build the Information Age.
Increasingly, you leave a trail of digital footprints throughout your day.

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google's fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive. Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

"the destructive, anti-civic forces of the internet. " "newspapers are the only means of holding local hospitals, schools, councils and the police to account, and on a national level they are absolutely essential for the good functioning of democracy."

The ever-growing empire produces nothing but seems determined to control everything

Article discussing the Google Social Graph API, a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person.

Via the Thinkhammer blog and the Iâ€™m Not Really A Geek blog, this great little cautionary tale / wake-up call for people who donâ€™t quite grasp that EVERYTHING they post on the internet is 100% public.

Just as Bill Clinton destroyed the idea that marijuana use was a disqualifier to serious work, the increasing volume of personal life online will come to mean that, even though there’s a picture from when your head was on fire that one time, you can still get a job.

There seems no part of public, private or commercial life that hasn’t been made more accessible through social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Hospitals are posting videos of surgeries on YouTube and doctors are sending tweets from operating rooms to educate the public and market their services. Those are just the latest examples of media-driven communication in places that used to be relatively private.
Is there such a thing as overuse of social networking tools? In the online world, is the notion of a public/private divide simply not applicable?
* Clay Shirky, Interactive Telecommunications Program at N.Y.U
* Timothy B. Lee, Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy
* Susan Mernit, former AOL vice president and blogger
* David E. Meyer psychology professor, University of Michigan

QtWeb is a lightweight, secure and portable browser having some unique UI and privacy features. QtWeb is an open source project based on Nokia's Qt framework (former Trolltech) and Apple's WebKit rendering engine (the same as being used in Apple Safari and Google Chrome).

A new WebKit-based browser for Windows.

Kostenloser, portabler Web Browser mit WebKit Engine.

QtWeb is compact, portable and secure web browser having some unique UI and privacy features. QtWeb is an open source project based on Nokia's Qt framework (former Trolltech) and Apple's WebKit rendering engine (the same as being used in Apple Safari and Google Chrome).

"QtWeb is compact, portable and secure web browser having some unique UI and privacy features. QtWeb is an open source project based on Nokia's Qt framework (former Trolltech) and Apple's WebKit rendering engine (the same as being used in Apple Safari and Google Chrome)."

A couple of months ago Erick Schonfeld wrote a post titled “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?” based on a source that has proved to be very reliable in the past. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter

Uses HTML and CSS to determine your browsing history. Slowish but effective.

This is a method of sniffing your browsing history without using Javascript. If you haven't cleaned your browsing history recently, just click "Start Scan" and the system will get to work. If this doesn't shock you, it should: websites are not supposed to see this information. It has potential for anyone, in particular advertisers, to view your history and profile you.

"Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds."

more on Deep packet

Deep packet inspection

How it's done.

The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.

Speculation on opening status updates up to the public and making them available to trolling search engines.

Reading: The Day Facebook Changed: Messages to Become Public By Default http://bit.ly/18mi52 [from http://twitter.com/sandroalberti/statuses/2348881447]

Wow, Facebook profiles are going public by default.

One of the most anticipated days in the history of social networking site Facebook has finally come: the company announced today that it has begun making status messages, photos and videos visible to the public at large by default instead of being visible only to a user's approved friends.

One of the most anticipated days in the history of social networking site Facebook has finally come: the company announced today that it has begun making status messages, photos and videos visible to the public at large by default instead of being visible only to a user's approved

Tales from the encrypt: If you care about the integrity of your data, it's time to investigate solutions for accessing and securing it – and not just for the here and now

"But what if I were killed or incapacitated before I managed to hand the passphrase over to an executor or solicitor who could use them to unlock all this stuff that will be critical to winding down my affairs – or keeping them going, in the event that I'm incapacitated? I don't want to simply hand the passphrase over to my wife, or my lawyer. Partly that's because the secrecy of a passphrase known only to one person and never written down is vastly superior to the secrecy of a passphrase that has been written down and stored in more than one place. Further, many countries's laws make it difficult or impossible for a court to order you to turn over your keys; once the passphrase is known by a third party, its security from legal attack is greatly undermined, as the law generally protects your knowledge of someone else's keys to a lesser extent than it protects your own."

Whether you want to keep your kids eyes away from inappropriate content or your employees from wasting time online, you'll find a variety of great tools available for filtering internet access in today's Hive Five.
Photo by Zach Klein.
Last week we asked you to share your favorite method of filtering internet content. While we originally intended to approach the topic from a software angle, it quickly became apparent that software didn't cut it for most people and that the majority of you are using either a combination of desktop software and a proxy server/firewall or just the latter by itself. The following solutions range, in difficultly of installation, from as simple as requiring five minutes to install to as complex as setting up a physical computer as a Linux-based content filter.
DansGuardian (Cross Platform, Free)
One way to measure whether or not Dansguardian is the right filtering tool for you is your willingness to install and tinker with an opera

Are you one of those people who has always wanted to hide a torrent inside an image? Wait no longer, with Hid.im it takes just one click to convert a torrent into an image file, with the option to decode it later on.

Former private investigator helps people "disappear" and move to new lives.

There are three key steps to disappearing. First, destroy old information about yourself. Call your video store or electricity company and replace your old, correct phone number with a new, invented one. Introduce spelling mistakes into your utility bills. Create a PO Box for your mail. Don’t use your credit cards and the like.
Then, create bogus information to fool private investigators who might be looking for you. Go to one city and apply for an apartment. Rent a car in another one.
The next, final step is the most important one. Move from point A to point B. Create a dummy company to pay your bills. Only use prepaid mobile phones and change them every month. It is nearly impossible to find out where you are unless you make a mistake.

ehind Vanish in detail. Briefly, as mentioned above, the user never knows the encryption key. This means that there is no risk of the user exposing that key at some point in the future, perhaps through coercion, court order, or compromise. So what do we do with the key? We could escrow it with a third party, but that raises serious trust issues (e.g., the case with Hushmail).

copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.

Storing the decryption key across many p2p nodes means you can "lose" the key at a specified time. As long as one of the p2p nodes you have used destroys the key, we can no longer decrypt the message. The theory is certainly sound, lets hope the implementation is.

Vanish is a research system designed to give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.

service using VPN to provide privacy - should be frequently used with bittorrent torrent file-sharing etc
ItsHidden.com is the ultimate FREE surfing privacy service on the Internet with huge capacity and no complicated software to install, you already have everything you need on your computer right now!

In a privacy error that underscores some of the biggest problems surrounding cloud-based services, Google has sent a notice to a number of users of its Document and Spreadsheets products stating that it may have inadvertently shared some of their documents with contacts who were never granted access to them.

Google products are NOT FREE. The Worlds’ Biggest Data Hoover makes you pay with your privacy.
Enjoy the ride in the “cloud”.
reply
Paul - March 7th, 2009 at 1:31 am PST
I agree with this balanced opinion.
reply
Smart Babes Are Sexy Blog - March 7th, 2009 at 7:49 am PST
Free or not, some things are just not acceptable.
Yes, air is “free”, but that does not allow people to pollute it with without abandon.
Facebook is “free”, but that does not allow it to take away all ownership rights of all the content I would post there.
As one comic book character once said, “With great power comes grea

More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.

IP Hider masks the real IP of a user, allowing him to browse all kind of pages without ever worrying that the ISPs or any other marketing tool is monitoring your surfing habits or spammers are attacking your computer. The simplest way to do this is to have traffic redirected through anonymous proxies.

How modern information gathering technology complicates the lives of those who want to start a new life.

The urge to disappear, to shed one’s identity and reemerge in another, surely must be as old as human society. It’s a fantasy that can flicker tantalizingly on the horizon at moments of crisis or grow into a persistent daydream that accompanies life’s daily burdens. A fight with your spouse leaves you momentarily despondent, perhaps, or a longtime relationship feels dead on its feet. Your mortgage payment becomes suddenly unmanageable, or a pile of debts gradually rises above your head. Maybe you simply awaken one day unable to shake your disappointment over a choice you could have made or a better life you might have had. And then the thought occurs to you: What if I could drop everything, abandon my life’s baggage, and start over as someone else?

a plan to escape

For Matthew Alan Sheppard, all of the anxiety, deception, and delusion converged in one moment on a crisp winter weekend in February 2008.

This service is made for you to save your time on registration for many sites.
You can not register at all sites, so just type the name of site for which you need to enter login and password and click «Get».

Sounds like whoever drafted the bill had just finished watching Die Hard 4.

Critics question revised proposal from Sen. Jay Rockefeller to let the White House do what it deems necessary to respond to a 'cybersecurity emergency.' Read this blog post by Declan McCullagh on Politics and Law.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

When Rockefeller (D-W. Virginia), the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said.
The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.

elps you convert convert text into picture so that it can escape the eyes of annoying spam bots or other bots like those of search engines. Nice thing about this tool is that it allows you to customize the font type, color, size and background color of the text when it is converted into an image. Plus it also hosts the image on its servers and gives you the link.

If you're using Firefox's built-in password management, you should also be using its master password feature to protect your saved passwords from prying eyes. But what happens if you lose your master password?

If you&#039;re using Firefox&#039;s built-in password management, you should also be using its master password feature to protect your saved passwords from prying eyes. But what happens if you lose your master password?

There's something you won't see mentioned by too many advocates of cloud computing – the main attraction is making money from you

_"...the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy..."_ - no kidding, "Sherlock":people/Cory_Doctorow? Took you long enough to figure out...

"There's something you won't see mentioned by too many advocates of cloud computing – the main attraction is making money from you"

Cory Doctorow: There's something you won't see mentioned by too many advocates of cloud computing – the main attraction is making money from you

This article shines light on the possible downside of user generated content. The author of the article outlines how more and more employers are turning to the net in order to see how prospective employees represent themselves to the world. Many could argue that this indeed is an invasion of privacy but this seems to be the avenue that is readily available for use. This article links with history2.0 as it exposes how our media consumption habits are continually changing with certain forms of media now being phased out to make way for new advanced media with multiplatform databases. The website that the article is found in is a multi platform for user generated content and provides the links to further spread information to other users. This gives legitimacy to the facts brought forward in the article as the information would have come from within the website.

We all know that employers are getting savvy to social networking sites and the information we share online. But what you may not know is that a recently conducted survey shows that nearly 1 in 2 companies are doing their online due diligence for prospective job candidates.
This according to research firm Harris Interactive, who was commissioned by CareerBuilder.com and surveyed 2,667 HR professionals, finding that 45% of them use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future.

This according to research firm Harris Interactive, who was commissioned by CareerBuilder.com and surveyed 2,667 HR professionals, finding that 45% of them use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

We intend for this site to be a central location for information on how to move your data in and out of Google products. Welcome.

"We intend for this site to be a central location for information on how to move your data in and out of Google products. Welcome." :-D

We intend for this site to be a central location for information on how to move your data in and out of Google products. Welcome. The Data Liberation Front The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that any data that you create in or import into a product is your own. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products. This is our mission statement

People everywhere are mindlessly over-sharing on the world's largest social network, without a second thought as to who's reading their posts or what effect it could have on them further down the road.

5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook

When the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we've got a problem...and it's not one ...

hen the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we've got a problem...and it's not one limited to the U.S.'s borders, either. People everywhere are mindlessly over-sharing on the world's largest social network, without a second thought as to who's reading their posts or what effect it could have on them further down the road. For example, did you know that 30% of today's employers are using Facebook to vet potential employees prior to hiring? In today's tough economy, the question of whether to post those embarrassing party pics could now cost you a paycheck in addition to a reputation. (Keep that in mind when tagging your friends' photos, too, won't you?)
But what can be done? It's not like you can just quit Facebook, right? No - and you don't have to either. You just need to take a few precautions.

At MIT, an experiment that identifies which students are gay is raising new questions about online privacy. Using data from Facebook, two students in an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person's online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. The project, given the name 'Gaydar' by the students, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative."
MIT professor Hal Abelson, who co-taught the course, is quoted: "That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information — because you don't have control over your information."

Using data from Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.
If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t.
Even if you don’t affirmatively post revealing information, simply publishing your friends’ list may reveal sensitive information about you, or it may lead people to make assumptions about you that are incorrect.

A new, Serious ARG (SARG?), from the people who brought you Perplex City. This time, commissioned by Channel 4 and aimed at teens. '...its goal is to illustrate the threats, dangers and opportunities of life online'. It doesn't have any offline activity, as far as I can tell, which makes sense with this demographic, the fact that Channel 4 is involved and the subject matter. It's a little to leading in the interactivity though, and not at really transmedia, so not strictly within the realms of what has come to be known as ARG. Still, interesting to see a current, non-commercial example of a participation drama.

Game supposedly teaching how to behave "responsibly" on social networking websites (and alike).

Late Friday afternoon, Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) Senior Editor Milton Coleman sent a memo to the staff with a social media policy—effectively immediately—aimed at staffers’ use of “individual accounts on online social networks, when used for reporting and for personal use.” The new policy was translated externally by WaPo ombudsman Andy Alexander on his blog, along with a worst-case illustration: the decision by Managing Editor Raju Narisetti, responsible for features and the web, to shut down what appears to have been a small Twitter account intended for a private audience of friends and associates (as private as something that goes to 90-ish people can be) after some of his comments were called into question.

Late Friday afternoon, Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) Senior Editor Milton Coleman sent a memo to the staff with a social media policy—effectively immediately—aimed at staffers’ use of “individual accounts on online social networks, when used for reporting and for personal use.”

The Washington Post's social media guidelines for its journalists are thought by some to be a little on the stringent side...
"All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens. Post journalists must recognize that any content associated with them in an online social network is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of what appears beneath their bylines in the newspaper or on our website."

What makes this all rather chilling is that I'm doing all of this via the application API. If your friend has installed an application, then it can access quite a lot of information about you, unless you turn it off. If your friend has granted the application the read_stream privilege, then it can read your status stream. Even if a friend of a friend has done this, and you comment on your friend's status entries, it's possible to infer your existence and retrieve those discussions through dark stalking.

Most recently, I've been able to obtain status feeds, even for users who have very tight privacy settings, although I had to tweak my own application's privileges to do so. I don't know how far into the past these go, but they also come with likes information, and comments. This gives me a wealth of information on the strength and types of relationships people have. A person who comments a lot on another user's posts probably finds that user interesting. If I descended into keyword and text analysis, I may even be able to determine how they find that user interesting.

Every day more users move their computing lives from the desktop to the cloud and rely on hosted web applications to store and access email, photos, and documents. But this new frontier involves serious risks that aren't obvious to most.

In an era of ubiquitous broadband, smartphones, and users who manage multiple computers and devices, it just makes sense to move your email, photos, documents, calendar, notes, finances, and contacts to awesome web applications like Gmail, Evernote, Flickr, Google Docs, Mint, etc. But transferring your personal data to hosted web applications has its potential pitfalls, risks that get lost in all the hype around cloud-centric new products like Google's new Chrome OS or the iPhone.

Below are some tips for "reputation management": influencing how you're perceived online, and what information is available relating to you

The first step in reputation management is preemptive: Think twice before putting your personal information online. Remember that although something might be appropriate for the context in which you're publishing it, search engines can make it very easy to find that information later, out of context, including by people who don't normally visit the site where you originally posted it. Translation: don't assume that just because your mom doesn't read your blog, she'll never see that post about the new tattoo you're hiding from her.

A comparison of users' expectations of privacy online and the data collection practices of website operators.

Approach: A comparison of users' expectations of privacy online and the data collection practices of website operators.
Goal: To identify specific practices that may be harmful or deceptive and attract the attention of government regulators.
Result: Recommendations for policymakers to protect consumers and for website operators to avoid stricter regulation.

research site for ghostery

The Current State of Web Privacy, Data Collection, and Information Sharing

evil!

Know Privacy: research by Joshua Gomez, Travis Pinnick, and Ashkan Soltani, UC Berkeley School of Information, class of 2009

Being secure, on the web specially is something we all need. There are thousands of risks roaming and getting evolved in shape of different malwares, viruses,

Being secure, on the web specially is something we all need. There are thousands of risks roaming and getting evolved in shape of different malwares, viruses, file & more. Since these things come via your browser and majority of us use firefox, here are some of the best and useful plugins/add-ons which can help you be safe on the internet.
--
http://digg.com/d1waHu

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

How much does Google know about you? http://ow.ly/zUKz [from http://twitter.com/LauraleeGuthrie/statuses/5484012833]

There’s no two ways about it: if you use a lot of Google services, then Google knows a lot about you. Google has received a solid amount of criticism because of this, and they’ve decided to alleviate the issue by launching Privacy Dashboard; a one-stop-shop with all the information that Google knows about you and your online habits collected in one place.
Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including GmailGmailGmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, OrkutOrkutOrkut, YouTubeYouTubeYouTube, PicasaPicasaPicasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and others. It’s quite a scary list; personally, I’m using all of these, and I was quite interested to see what exactly I’ve told GoogleGoogleGoogle about myself without even knowing.

There's no two ways about it: if you use a lot of Google services, then Google knows a lot about you. Google has received a solid amount of criticism because of

a provocative argument against the stand-by-and-watch version of citizen journalism. I'd argue, though, that those who stand by and watch are in the minority among the Twitter population.

I’d probably feel slightly smug, if I didn’t feel so sick.
Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.
Unfortunately it’s hard to feel smug – hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea – when thirteen innocent people are dead.

"I track myself - 40 things about my body, mind, and activity - every day. The fact that I do this tracking seems to interest people. Whether they are driven by curiosity about the phenomenon of personal data collection, or by the desire for a yardstick by which to measure and compare themselves, the fascination exists."

Reader Jonathan sent us this snazzy graph he made comparing different disposable email services, which got us wondering: What do you use to keep your primary email address out of the public (and spammer's) eye?

As an ex-Brit, I’m well aware of the authorities’ love of surveillance and snooping, but even I, a pessimistic cynic, am amazed by the governments latest plan: to install Orwell’s telescreens in 20,000 homes.

£400 million ($668 million) will be spend on installing and monitoring CCTV cameras in the homes of private citizens.

Today we are launching "interest-based" advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view.

That's why Google has worked hard to create technology that makes the advertising on our own sites, and those of our partners, as relevant as possible. To date, we have shown ads based mainly on what your interests are at a specific moment. So if you search for [digital camera] on Google, you'll get ads related to digital cameras. If you are visiting the website of one of our AdSense partners, you would see ads based on the content of the page. For example, if you're reading a sports page on a newspaper website, we might show ads for running shoes. Or we can show ads for home maintenance services alongside a YouTube video instructing you on how to perform a simple repair. There are some situations, however, where a keyword or the content of a web page simply doesn't give us enough information to serve highly relevant ads.

26 Nov 09: new article which gives idea of the scale of the Deep Web and how much of it is actually searched...!

ut Rajaraman knows different. "I think it's a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don't know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know."

If you're of the mindset that what you do with your BitTorrent client is your business and not that of people snooping, sniffing, and prying at your packets along the way, ItsHidden offers a free VPN server to anonymize your activity.

In conclusion, we at EFF are worried that today's changes will lead to Facebook users publishing to the world much more information about themselves than they ever intended.

The new changes are intended to simplify Facebook's notoriously complex privacy settings and, in the words of today's privacy announcement to all Facebook users, "give you more control of your information." But do all of the changes really give Facebook users more control over their information? EFF took a close look at the changes to figure out which ones are for the better — and which ones are for the worse.

Beginning today, Google will now personalize the search results of anyone who uses its search engine, regardless of whether they’ve opted-in to a previously existing personalization feature. Searchers will have the ability to opt-out completely, and there are various protections designed to safeguard privacy. However, being opt-out rather than opt-in will likely raise some concerns. The company has an announcement here. Below, a deeper look.
The short story is this. By watching what you click on in search results, Google can learn that you favor particular sites. For example, if you often search and click on links from Amazon that appear in Google’s results, over time, Google learns that you really like Amazon. In reaction, it gives Amazon a ranking boost. That means you start seeing more Amazon listings, perhaps for searches where Amazon wasn’t showing up before.

In particular, we now have two “flavors” of personalized search, or “Web History” as is the official Google name for it. There’s Signed-Out Web History and Signed-In Web History.

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.
Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.
For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

Bruce Schneier once again gets good mileage out of his earlier essay on the value of privacy. This time quoting portions in response to a remark made by Eric Schmidt with the typical "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" argument.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

Last week Facebook rolled out a new version of their privacy settings to all users. Privacy settings are something that many Facebook users are regularly confused about. That’s why we published our original Facebook privacy guide back in February. After millions of people visited our privacy guide, we realized how important privacy is to Facebook users. With the new settings rolled out, we thought that now would be a great time to update the guide with the latest changes.
In this guide we present a thorough overview of the most important privacy settings which includes previous settings that are still relevant as well as new privacy settings that have been added by Facebook. The majority of the old privacy settings are still relevant, however there’s a chance that you may now be sharing much more information with the whole world. Make it through our new Facebook privacy guide and you’re guaranteed to be safe.

What are the results you get back for a search on the US health care debate? Fox News might be all set to lambaste Google for giving a liberal site top billing, only to find that CNN reports that it’s a conservative site that’s number one — and both stations might be wrong. That’s because the results each reports on will be only what their particular reporters at each station saw. Their viewers may see different results. In fact, each one of their viewers may see results different from one another.

On Friday afternoon, Google made the biggest change that has ever happened in search engines, and the world largely yawned. Maybe Google timed its

FireFound is an add-on for Firefox and Fennec (mobile Firefox) that helps your find your computer (or mobile phone, in the case of Fennec) if it is lost or stolen. Every time your computer's location changes, FireFound sends a secure message to a central server with its current location. You can then log into the server and see your computer's current location.
All of the location data is encrypted, so no one can find out where your computer is without your password.
If you lose your computer, you can tell FireFound to clear your personal data (saved passwords, browsing history, etc.) if anyone starts your browser before you can retrieve it.

FireFound is an add-on for Firefox and Fennec (mobile Firefox) that helps your find your computer (or mobile phone, in the case of Fennec) if it is lost or stolen

The tool to trace your laptop through ff's geolocation feature and nuke the computer remotely if needed. Firefox addon.

Given these numbers, the authors estimate that even a moderate-sized botnet of 10,000 machines could successfully obtain identity verifications for younger residents of West Virginia at a rate of 47 a minute.

Two researchers have found that a pair of antifraud methods intended to increase the chances of detecting bogus social security numbers has actually allowed the statistical reconstruction of the number using information that many people place on social networking sites.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as ...

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is "the vector around which Facebook operates."
I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Being part of a botnet is no fun. Your computer becomes your worst enemy, watching everything you do, collecting all of your secrets, and then delivering all that data to the bot-herder; the person who originated the network. But what does it really mean to be part of a botnet, and is there anything that can you do about it?

good information about determining if your pc is infected with malware

If you allow applications to save your passwords, anyone with physical access to your PC can decode them unless you're properly encrypting them—and chances are pretty good you're not. Let's walk through the right and wrong ways to store your passwords.

If you allow applications to save your passwords, anyone with physical access to your PC can decode them unless you&#039;re properly encrypting them&mdash;and chances are pretty good you&#039;re not. Let&#039;s walk through the right and wrong ways to store your passwords.

PHProxy is a web HTTP proxy programmed in PHP meant to bypass firewalls and access otherwise inaccessible resources (i.e. blocked websites). If the server this script is run on can access a resource, so can you!

php based web proxy to get round firewalls blocking sites

proxy server web download http

Very funky looking PHP web application to get around browsing restrictions. Like it, should really put this on dmesg.

Chances are you wouldn't tell grandma about the wild party you went to last Saturday night. Likewise, you might have spent Sunday evening at home knittin' a mitten ...

This newest change in the privacy options for sharing content on Facebook represents a major change to the nature of communicating on the site. If it's implemented well it could make a dramatic difference in the way people use the site. Given the change underway and the company's move to lobby governments around the world in favor of its privacy philosophy, we think it would be a good idea to have a more thorough public conversation about what that philosophy is.

The Adobe Flash Player maintains proprietary cookies called Local Shared Objects or LSO’s. LSO’s are capable of storing 100 kb’s of information for an indefinite amount of time by default. When you clear your browser history in Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera on Windows, Linux, or OS X LSO’s are not cleared from Adobe’s local repository.

Os X

There are hundreds of applications out there from spyware cleaners to built-in browser features that eliminate cookies on the spot, and even let you set cookie policies on your computer regarding what can be stored in your machine, and for how long.
I’m assuming that if you’re here reading this post, you already know all of the dangers of cookies on your computer. In all honesty, I don’t seriously believe that they’re the most dangerous form of movement or web tracking, but they can definitely be used to monitor more movements than a person should feel comfortable with.

Explains how to adjust your Flash player settings

Shame on you, Adobe!

Never new this! Amazing amount of stuff stored on your computer using flash 'cookies' which never gets cleaned from the browser.

Ed. note: On Tuesday, Google responded to cyber attacks aimed at Chinese human-rights activists by ending search-result censorship in China. An anonymous reader with experience living where privacy isn't respected writes in with tips for keeping your data safe in these situations.

GoogleSharing is a special kind of anonymizing proxy service, designed for a very specific threat.

"GoogleSharing is a special kind of anonymizing proxy service, designed for a very specific threat. It ultimately aims to provide a level of anonymity that will prevent google from tracking your searches, movements, and what websites you visit. GoogleSharing is not a full proxy service designed to anonymize all your traffic, but rather something designed exclusively for your communication with Google. Our system is totally transparent, with no special "alternative" websites to visit. Your normal work flow should be exactly the same." http://www.thoughtcrime.org/ & http://www.disruptivestudies.org/

GoogleSharing is a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, such that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom.

"If we're building a public stage, we need to give people the ability to protect themselves, the ability to face the consequences honestly. We cannot hide behind rhetoric of how everyone is public just because everyone we know in our privileged circles is walking confidently into the public sphere and assuming no risk. And we can't justify our decisions as being simply about changing norms when the economic incentives are all around. I'm with Marshall on this one: Facebook's decision is an economic one, not a social norms one. And that scares the bejesus out of me.
People care deeply about privacy, especially those who are most at risk of the consequences of losing it. Let us not forget about them. It kills me when the bottom line justifies social oppression. Is that really what the social media industry is about?"

When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

Danah Boyd : “Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control."

There isn't some radical shift in norms taking place. What's changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn't mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn't mean that folks who live their lives in public don't value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.

In December, Facebook made a series of bold and controversial changes regarding the nature of its users' privacy on the social networking site. The company once known for protecting privacy to the point of exclusivity (it began its days as a network for college kids only - no one else even had access), now seemingly wants to compete with more open social networks like the microblogging media darling Twitter.

Official misuses are bad enough, but it's the unofficial uses that worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don't.
The problem is that such control makes us all less safe. Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.

"In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.
Google's system isn't unique. Democratic governments around the world -- in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example -- are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell."

Schneier on how the mandated backdoor access system allowed for the China incident

See your friends on a map with Google Latitude
To start using Google Latitude on your computer, sign in to your Google Account.
* See your friends locations and status messages on a full-screen map
* Control your location and who gets to see it

"It gets to a deeper problem with Google Buzz: It's built on email, which is a very different Internet application than a social network." - I couldn't agree more; this new Google feature should NOT be based on your Gmail contacts, which are typically more private than, say, your friends on Twitter or Facebook.

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home. It gets even worse if you have "friends" who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That's right, slap them across the face.

“We have a Facebook page,” said one official of the Department of Homeland Security. “But we don’t allow people to look at Facebook in the office. So we have to go home to use it. I find this bizarre.”

The laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families.

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.
If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don't know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I'm getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students' clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.

School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home Boing Boing

if you borrow a laptop from your school or government, double check they're not spying on you. Scary post from Boing Boing about how one school in Philadelphia has been turning on the students' web cameras remotely to monitor "student behaviour". via stephen downes.

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. Creepy!

See also /. discussion http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/2010213/PA-School-Defends-Web-Cam-Spying-As-Security-Measure-Denies-Misuse

“The Torpig botnet was hijacked by the good guys for ten days earlier this year before its controllers issued an update and took the botnet back. During that time, however, researchers were able to gain a glimpse into the kind of information the botnet gathers as well as the behavior of Internet users who are prone to malware infections. ” – via nelson

"With stories abounding of identity theft aided by information lifted from discarded storage devices, you want devices you no longer plan to use to have no usable information when they head out the door. Here's how to wipe them clean."

We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later.
Oliver North learned this, way back in 1987, when messages he thought he had deleted were saved by the White House PROFS system, and then subpoenaed in the Iran-Contra affair. Bill Gates learned this in 1998 when his conversational e-mails were provided to opposing counsel as part of the antitrust litigation discovery process. Mark Foley learned this in 2006 when his instant messages were saved and made public by the underage men he talked to. Paris Hilton learned this in 2005 when her cell phone account was hacked, and Sarah Palin learned it earlier this year when her Yahoo e-mail account was hacked. ...
Ephemeral conversation is dying.
Cardinal Richelieu:If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

"Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed. This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations -- with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet -- are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails. We know this intellectually, but we haven't truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later."

When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record.

"When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record."

But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard ephemeral conversation.

"The younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. ... until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers -- we aren't fully an information age society." (via Oblinks)

August 4, 2006, the personal search queries of 650,000 AOL (America Online) users accidentally ended up on the Internet, for all to see. These search queries were entered in AOL's search engine over a three-month period. After three days AOL realized their blunder and removed the data from their site, but the sensitive private data had already leaked to several other sites. I love Alaska tells the story of one of those AOL users. We get to know a religious middle-aged woman from Houston, Texas, who spends her days at home behind her TV and computer. Her unique style of phrasing combined with her putting her ideas, convictions and obsessions into AOL's search engine, turn her personal story into a disconcerting novel of sorts.

documentary about the search terms from one AOL user in Alaska

AOL accidentally leaked search queries of a cheating wife who is dumped by het cyberlover

Post written by Leo Babauta.
Are we too reliant on Google’s services? As long-time readers know, I love Google’s products and use them daily, as they’re absolutely the best I’ve tried in their categories: Google search, Gmail, Google Chrome browser, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Picasa, mostly.
However, last week, I decided to try an experiment: could I go (mostly) Google-free? How hard would it be? How much would I like the alternatives?It took me one day. Here’s how I did it, and how it’s turned out so far.

However, last week, I decided to try an experiment: could I go (mostly) Google-free? How hard would it be? How much would I like the alternatives?
It took me one day.
Here’s how I did it, and how it’s turned out so far.

"However, last week, I decided to try an experiment: could I go (mostly) Google-free? How hard would it be? How much would I like the alternatives?
It took me one day."

He added the company has been experimenting with analysis of user sentiment, tracking the mood of its audience through what they are doing online. Such information is potentially very interesting to large brands, which are always seeking to measure what their customers think about their own or competitors' products.
Facebook's advertising technology already allows advertisers to choose which sort of customer will see their ­display adverts when they log on to the site. Advertisers can choose from such ­categories as where the user is located and their age and gender, based upon what the user has uploaded on to Facebook – which is adding about 450,000 new users a day.

Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.

Article was updated. One time there were military helicopters that were hovering directly over me and Kenneth's apartments in Bowling Green. I went to tell Francis Gardler what had just happened to me and he just dismissed me as paranoid and crazy. Of course, military helicopters really did hover directly over our apartments. That's about the time that I started losing respect for Gardler.

Whether you were in Kansas and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications: says Whistleblower Russell Tice

Clients of Ning are outraged [Link disabled by Ning] over a decision that Ning made public last week. The software maker sent out an email to all of its clients, those who have created a social network on Ning, stating that they would email all members of all websites who use the Ning software to promote the newly designed Ning.com.

Web application whspr! creates a private feedback form that you can share on services like Twitter without revealing your real email address.
Simply enter your real email address, a description of what the form is for, and the number of days you want the form to be active. Once completed, you'll be given a URL to the form to share with others. This application could be useful for job postings, blog contests or giveaways—pretty much anything where you'd like email responses but don't want to give out an email address.
If you want to send private messages instead of receiving them, check out previously mentioned Whisper Bot, or you can send your awkward messages anonymously with NiceCritic.

Someday, somewhere, somehow your computer will be gone. It will be stolen, or the hard drive will self-destruct, or it will be hit by a meteor. While the latter would at least provide you with an excellent story, assuming you weren't using it at the time, having your laptop stolen, as mine was recently, just plain sucks. However, I did manage to learn a few things in the wake of disaster, and wanted to take the opportunity to share them with you here.

Three things are lost with a computer's theft: hardware, data, and privacy. I'll let others deal with the emotional aspects of loss, and instead focus on the practical ones.

There is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.
What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety.

Problems with privacy are making experts to think about a new inertenet. Question to the class: Is it possible?

"there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.""A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy."

"What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there"

Attempting to command, as well as deal with, the on the internet status has become increasingly hard.

But the nonsense we’re all worried about today? I just don’t think it will carry the same weight in a few years. Because if there are pictures of the person hiring you smoking pot in college online, and there are pictures of every other candidate smoking pot in college online, it just won’t be a big deal any more.
And the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor, and a sign of an ambitious individual who has pissed off a few people along the way.
At least that’s what I hope will happen. Because there are a few pictures of me in high school and college that I’m tired of trying to keep off the Internet. Let’s just get it all out there sooner rather than later, and move on.

by Michael Arrington, TechCrucnh - March 28, 2010

Trying to manage, or even control, the on the web status has become progressively difficult.

Internet standards expert, CEO of web company iFusion Labs, and blogger John Pozadzides knows a thing or two about password security&mdash;and he knows exactly how he&#039;d hack the weak passwords you use all over the internet.

ermany is on the verge of censoring its Internet: The government – a grand coalition between the German social democrats and conservative party – seems united in its decision: On Thursday the parliament is to vote on the erection of an internet censorship architecture.

German politicians already seem to be lining up with their wish-list of content to be censored in future – the suggestions ranging form gambling sites, islamist web pages, first person shooters, and the music industry cheering up with the thought of finally banning pirate bay and p2p.

Security concerns and record-keeping laws mean that Barack Obama is unlikely to become the first e-mailing president.

Obama may need to give up his BlackBerry to become president.

"For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign."

Given how important it is for him to get unfiltered information from as many sources as possible, he will miss the freedom of email

e session cookies for every photo request, but we’ll assume this is impractical giv

Last March, Facebook caught some flak when some hacks circulated showing how to access private photos of any user. These were enabled by egregiously lazy design: viewing somebody’s private photos simply required determining their user ID (which shows up in search results) and then manually fetching a URL of the form:
www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1&view=all&subj=[uid]&id=[uid]
This hack was live for a few weeks in February, exposing some photos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and (reportedly) Paris Hilton, before the media picked it up in March and Facebook upgraded the site.
Instead of using properly formatted PHP queries as capabilities to view photos, Faceook now verifies the requesting user against the ACL for each photo request. What could possibly go wrong? Well, as I discovered this week, the photos themselves are served from a separate content-delivery domain, leading to some problems which

9000, which can be searched in about 45 minutes using one script. This is also easily parallelisable, given that we can query any of the mirrored photo servers in the

Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products. The map shows the number of requests that we received between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009, with certain limitations.

Facebook launched some fairly impressive new features and services at its recent f8 conference, but some of them were also more than just a little scary. Since a lot of what the company talked about was introduced in either “developer speak” — involving terms like API [...]

Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default.

Article showing comparison of Facebook's privacy policy over the years

History of Facebook privacy erosion.

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline

Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.

Facebook is a dangerous place to have a profile on - not because of maurading online predators, but because you don't know where you stand with it as a company. This research from the EFF proves that they are happy to re-jig their privacy rules in order make money from their users.

Google's blog launch of Latitude: "Latitude is a new feature for Google Maps on your mobile device. It's also an iGoogle gadget on your computer. Once you've opted in to Latitude, you can see the approximate location of your friends and loved ones who have decided to share their location with you. So now you can do things like see if your spouse is stuck in traffic on the way home from work, notice that a buddy is in town for the weekend, or take comfort in knowing that a loved one's flight landed safely, despite bad weather."

See where your friends are with Google Latitude

Latitude is a new feature for Google Maps on your mobile device. It's also an iGoogle gadget on your computer. Once you've opted in to Latitude, you can see the approximate location of your friends and loved ones who have decided to share their location with you. So now you can do things like see if your spouse is stuck in traffic on the way home from work, notice that a buddy is in town for the weekend, or take comfort in knowing that a loved one's flight landed safely, despite bad weather.

How often do you find yourself wondering where your friends are and what they're up to? It's a pretty central question to our daily social lives, and it's precisely the question you can now answer using Google Latitude.
Latitude is a new feature for Google Maps on your mobile device. It's also an iGoogle gadget on your computer. Once you've opted in to Latitude, you can see the approximate location of your friends and loved ones who have decided to share their location with you. So now you can do things like see if your spouse is stuck in traffic on the way home from work, notice that a buddy is in town for the weekend, or take comfort in knowing that a loved one's flight landed safely, despite bad weather.

Thinking about quiting ole Facebook soon. http://is.gd/bZVab Just getting tired of it. But can I do it? Is the question. Started thinking
– Jabiz Raisdana (intrepidteacher) http://twitter.com/intrepidteacher/statuses/13623538994

RT @draenews: Del The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook: http://bit.ly/cEf3sP

In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user's personal information to just their friends and their "network" (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user's personal information have become more and more permissive. They've also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook's effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a

"While the sniffing of e-mails is not unknown — it’s how Google serves up targeted ads in Gmail and how Yahoo filters out viruses, for example — the notion that a legitimate e-mail would be not be delivered based on its content is extraordinary."

Facebook private messages are governed by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which forbids communications providers from intercepting user messages, barring limited exceptions for security and valid legal orders.
While the sniffing of e-mails is not unknown — it’s how Google serves up targeted ads in Gmail and how Yahoo filters out viruses, for example — the notion that a legitimate e-mail would be not be delivered based on its content is extraordinary.

article re FB censoring messages containing piratebay

AHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHA

On Facebook, links to The Pirate Bay is not allowed even in private messages

"Zuckerberg was an amoral, Asperger’s-like entrepreneur... Zuckerberg represents the best and worst aspects of entrepreneurship. His drive, skill and fearlessness are only matched by his long record–recorded in lawsuit after lawsuit–of backstabbing, stealing and cheating."

Calcanis destroys Zuckerberg

Jason Calacanis' analysis of Zuckerberg as a throat-slitting sleazeball

Last year, when I realized that Zuckerberg was an amoral,
Asperger’s-like entrepreneur, I told Zynga CEO Mark Pincus that
Zuckerberg would try and slit his throat. I knew this because I
watched Zuckerberg screw over his users again and again in terms of
privacy, and I heard about the stories of him screwing over his former
employers at ConnectU and his early partners at Facebook.
The money quote from Business Insider’s scoop comes from Zuckerberg
himself: “they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them.
So I’m like delaying it so it won’t be ready until after the facebook
thing comes out.” He stalled and sandbagged ConnectU–then
Zuckerpunched them! Of course, the person he said this to was his
partner–Eduardo Saverin–who he reportedly screwed as well.

With all the privacy issues surrounding Facebook, many people are considering quitting the site altogether. If you're not ready to take it that far, here's how to avoid the privacy breaches without completely deleting your account and losing touch with your friends.

ust as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenseless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."
The negative characteristics of cloud computing that Stallman id

"The negative characteristics of cloud computing that Stallman identifies are very real, but the solution that he prescribes seems grossly myopic and counterintuitive. ... Stallman correctly recognizes those problems, but his belief that the problems are intractable is simply wrong. The open source software movement has found productive ways to address the same kind of problems on the desktop, and I'm confident that reasonable solutions can be found to bring the same level of freedom to the cloud. The challenges posed by new computing paradigms will require the open source software community to evolve and adapt, not collectively stick its head in the sand. "

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury.

"I feel Mark doesn't believe in privacy that much, or at least believes in privacy as a stepping stone. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong."
Again in Kirkpatrick's book, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg puts it this way:
"Mark really does believe very much in transparency and the vision of an open society and open world, and so he wants to push people that way. I think he also understands that the way to get there is to give people granular control and comfort. He hopes you'll get more open, and he's kind of happy to help you get there. So for him, it's more of a means to an end. For me, I'm not as sure."
Facebook declined to comment about Mark's attitude toward privacy.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5#ixzz0o6FVa5qF

The Cybersecurity Act gives the president the ability to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any "critical" information network "in the interest of national security." does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency-- left to the president. grants the Secretary of Commerce "access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access." This means... can monitor or access any data on private or public networks without regard to privacy laws. The bill could undermine the Electronic Communications Privacy Act enacted in the mid '80s, requires law enforcement seek a warrant before tapping in to data transmissions between computers. might violate the Constitutional protection against searches without cause. Once information is accessed, it can be used for whatever purpose, no matter the original reason for accessing something

from the page: "The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF) gives the president the ability to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any "critical" information network "in the interest of national security." The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president... It also grants the Secretary of Commerce "access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access." ... When one person can access all information on a network, "it makes it more vulnerable to intruders," Granick says... "Once information is accessed, it can be used for whatever purpose, no matter the original reason for accessing something... Who's interested in this [bill]? Law enforcement and people in the security industry who want to ensure more government dollars go to them...""

"...a click in the right direction for the armed service which seems to be making a slow but steady recovery from its lingering hostility towards social media."

The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has learned. That move reverses a years-long trend of blocking the web 2.0 locales on military networks.
Army public affairs managers have worked hard to share the service’s stories through social sites like Flickr, Delicious and Vimeo. Links to those sites featured prominently on the Army.mil homepage. The Army carefully nurtured a Facebook group tens of thousands strong, and posted more than 4,100 photos to a Flickr account. Yet the people presumably most interested in these sites — the troops — were prevented from seeing the material. Many Army bases banned access to the social networks.

An emerging field called collective intelligence could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

The success of Google, along with the rapid spread of the wireless Internet and sensors — like location trackers in cellphones and GPS units in cars — has touched off a race to cash in on collective intelligence technologies.

collective intelligence

“The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence. “For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”

Palins e-mail was hacked into not with expert knowledge of computer systems, but rather a well thought out trick to recover her account password. This just goes to show information is power. People can find personal information on many other people in the world. If this information gets into the wrong hands, there are ways to it may be used against you.

With all the talk lately about Facebook's flawed privacy systems, it's a good time to consider what you're making available elsewhere on the web and on your system. These 10 settings tweaks and setups make your web life a little less public.

There was an interesting article recently in The New York Times about getting locked out of a Gmail account.
In August, blogger Alan Shimel of StillSecure wrote about his problems regaining access to a Yahoo e-mail account. Suffice it to say that if someone learns your Web mail password, it's a very difficult situation--one that may not end well.
For one thing, the Web mail provider may not know enough about you to determine the true account owner. Worse still, anyone using a free Web mail account from Google (Gmail), Yahoo, or Microsoft (Hotmail) can't expect to talk to a human being to resolve a problem with their account. Talking to person at Google requires a subscription to Google Apps Premier Edition for $50 a year. Microsoft and Yahoo similarly offer telephone support only to "premium" customers.
If you care about a Web mail account, then some homework may be in order.
Alternate e-mail address
One thing Web mail users should have associated with their account is an alternat

"Originating from Wootton High School, the parent said, students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that "mimic" those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later." Interesting if true, but only source may be one 'parent,' no one else (incl MoCo police) knows about it according to story. Maybe anti speed camera hoax? Web link doesn't work on 2/19/09.

hurt the integrity of the Speed Camera Program. "It will cause potential problems for the Speed Camera Program in terms of the confidence in it," he said.
He said he is glad someone caught it before it becomes more widespread and he said he hopes that the word get

As a prank, students from local high schools have been taking advantage of the county's Speed Camera Program in order to exact revenge on people who they believe have wronged them in the past, including other students and even teachers.
Students from Richard Montgomery High School dubbed the prank the Speed Camera "Pimping" game, according to a parent of a student enrolled at one of the high schools.
Originating from Wootton High School, the parent said, students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that "mimic" those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later.

[County Council President] Andrews said that this could hurt the integrity of the Speed Camera Program. "It will cause potential problems for the Speed Camera Program in terms of the confidence in it"

As a prank, students from local high schools have been taking advantage of the county's Speed Camera Program in order to exact revenge on people who they believe have wronged them in the past, including other students and even teachers.

The popularity and near necessity of social media sites has grown tremendously in the last few years, helping small businesses make connections, giving freelancers and students the chance to network with people they’d never be able to meet otherwise, and allow a place for all kinds of interest groups to chat and make friends online–from gardeners to book lovers to sports junkies. There is a dangerous and corrupt side to social media creators and users; however, and the ability to create fake profiles and violate privacy and copyright rules is still more than possible. Read below for 25 of the most shocking crimes in social media history.

How difficult is it to deleted your social networking account? in some cases very and in others imposible

[...] we’ll take a look at the account deletion processes of popular websites and services, and how easy or difficult they make it. Then we’ll discuss why sites make things so complicated, and some things to consider when designing your own deletion policies.

Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas. People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more.

Mark Zuckerberg/The Washington Post, May 24, 2010.

"There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services."

The issue with Facebook's latest change is not that they force you to link your interests without permission, but rather that they remove an option to express yourself on the profile without links. As we noted, Facebook users now face a Hobson's choice between the new Connections and no listed interests at all. As Facebook explains, "If you didn't connect to any of the suggestions, the sections of your profile to which those suggestions corresponded will now be empty." (The transition tool also allows you to delay the choice by saying 'Ask Me Later'). Previously, you could list interests in your profile without linking; after the transition, you cannot. You do have options to adjust visibility on the profile page, for which we commend Facebook, but nevertheless, this is not a true opt-out because the all the "Facebook Pages you connect to are public."

An ordinary human is not going to look through the list of Facebook's millions of cooking fans. It's far too large. Only data miners and targeted advertisers have the time and inclination to delve that deeply.

"Once upon a time, Facebook could be used simply to share your interests and information with a select small community of your own choosing. As Facebook's privacy policy once promised, "No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.""

"More than half (57%) of adult internet users say they have used a search engine to look up their name and see what information was available about them online, up from 47% who did so in 2006. Young adults, far from being indifferent about their digital footprints, are the most active online reputation managers in several dimensions. For example, more than two-thirds (71%) of social networking users ages 18-29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online. Reputation management has now become a defining feature of online life for many internet users, especially the young. … When compared with older users, young adults are more likely to restrict what they share and whom they share it with. “Contrary to the popular perception that younger users embrace a laissez-faire attitude about their online reputations, young adults are often more vigilant than older adults when it comes to managing their online identities,” said Madden."

"Young adults, far from being indifferent about their digital footprints, are the most active online reputation managers in several dimensions. For example, more than two-thirds (71%) of social networking users ages 18-29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online."

More than half (57%) of adult internet users say they have used a search engine to look up their name and see what information was available about them online, up from 47% who did so in 2006. Young adults, far from being indifferent about their digital footprints, are the most active online reputation managers in several dimensions. For example, more than two-thirds (71%) of social networking users ages 18-29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online.

A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social *opensource* network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business.

"They just assumed Facebook would evolve as their lives shifted from adolescent to adult and their needs changed. Facebook's failure to recognize this culture change deeply threatens its future profits."

"Facebook's imbroglio over privacy reveals what may be a fatal business model..."

Privacy. Seemingly altruistic companies screwing over their users for monetization and business models

What lessons can we draw from the Facebook flameup? Lifecycle changes can trump generational change and cultural values perceived as crucial at the age of 13 can be very different at 20. A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs.

If you're going to use Facebook, you should definitely know how to keep your information private.

Myspace is a social media site that is operated and drunk driving charge possessed. The positioning ended up being started by simply Mark Zuckerberg any time he or she had been the basic university student at Harvard as well as grew swiftly to incorporate hundreds of millions involving people

But if you're going to use Facebook, you should definitely know how to keep your information private.

Worried about Facebook privacy but still want to keep your account? A visual guide to how to lock it down.
http://bit.ly/aHcihN

You'll never quit. So protect yourself.

How To Set Your Privacy settings in Facebook - FB really, really made it hard to impossible.... ¦ http://bit.ly/bARi1x

Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.

RedPhone provides end-to-end encryption for your calls, securing your conversations so that nobody can listen in. It's easy to use, and functions just like the normal dialer you're accustomed to. RedPhone uses your normal mobile number for addressing, so there's no need to have yet another identifier or account name; if you know someone's mobile number you know how to call them using RedPhone. And when you receive a RedPhone call your phone will ring just like normal, even if it is asleep.

About VidMe :
"Take control of your online sharing. We created VidMe to help you privately share your personal videos with just those you want. Without worrying about them being shown to all our "friends" at once, or being broadcast to the whole internet in one fell swoop... "( VidMe.com)

They are showing that Top 100 lists can be gamed and that entertaining content can reach mass popularity without having any commercial intentions (regardless of whether or not someone decided to commercialize it on the other side). Their antics force people to think about status and power and they encourage folks to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously. The mindset is deeply familiar to me and it doesn’t surprise me when I learn that old hacker types get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about 4chan even if trolls and griefers annoy the hell out of them. In a mediated environment where marketers are taking over, there’s something subversively entertaining about betting on the anarchist subculture. Cuz, really, at the end of the day, many old skool hackers weren’t entirely thrilled to realize that mainstreamification of net culture meant that mainstream culture would dominate net culture.

"Facebook speaks of itself as a utility while also telling people they have a choice. But there’s a conflict here. We know this conflict deeply in the United States. When it comes to utilities like water, power, sewage, Internet, etc., I am constantly told that I have a choice. But like hell I’d choose Comcast if I had a choice. Still, I subscribe to Comcast. Begrudgingly. Because the “choice” I have is Internet or no Internet.
I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them."

"I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them."

Good reminder RT @MR21c How to Return Facebook Privacy Settings to What You Signed Up For http://bit.ly/d7VapU via @lifehacker

"Online privacy expectations are evolving, but whether Facebook likes it or not, a lot of us want the privacy settings we signed up for when we joined the service. Here's how to use Facebook's new privacy controls to regain your original privacy."

Before signing on, please ensure you have received your RealIdentity card from local authorities. Signing on to the internet without identifying yourself has been ruled illegal in the Stop Anonymity Act of 2012, and you need to be sure to associate your comments, emails, posts and more with your real name. Setting up your RealIdentity is easy, as your computer (MacOS 15 or ChromeOS7 and higher) will automatically connect to your near-by card, verifying it with your biometric data. Do not put on shades, veils, contact lenses, and please shave before the biometric scan starts; it is advised to not perform biometric authentication after a long night of drinking.

There's a new Facebook search site out there with a concept similar to PleaseRobMe, a site that demonstrates just how easy it is for bad guys to use social networking crap to tell when you're away from your home. This new Facebook Search allows anyone to search for potentially embarrassing updates that can now be viewed by the public.

A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of not having a peddler's license and peddling in a prohibited area were dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison.

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.
Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.
The legal justification for arresting the "shooter" rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested.

For some reason I was under the mistaken impression that setting up an OpenID on my own domain, ginatrapani.org, would be a big hassle: that I'd have to host my own OpenID server software and that it would take all sorts of installation and maintenance BS to do so. I feel strongly about owning my identity online, mapping it to my nameplate domain, and actively choosing an authorizing party instead of just accepting the sign-in service du jour like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, or Google. Still, I never got set up with OpenID on ginatrapani.org because my perceived hassle factor was daunting. Instead, I used idproxy.net for my OpenID and put the domain setup on my "someday I have to do that" list. It meant that my OpenID was ginatrapani.idproxy.net instead of my own domain. Idproxy is a great service and I thank them for getting me started with OpenID; but still, I want my OpenID URL to be a domain name I own and control.

I used to love Facebook. I was in law school at Wisconsin when it launched, and everyone I knew on the site was basically a peer -- people who I'd known well or at least met in person at some point. Then... I graduated. Suddenly having a Facebook account full of pictures from blurry nights in Madison and Pulitzer Prize-caliber dirty jokes from my friends wasn't so awesome anymore -- especially once I started working for Engadget and lots and lots of people I didn't actually know (or, somewhat even worse, only knew professionally) started looking at my personal page. So I needed a system -- a way to still use Facebook to share personal stuff with friends, professional stuff with colleagues, and awesome stuff with everyone, all without blurring any lines or accidentally sharing too much with people I don't know.

I used to love Facebook. I was in law school at Wisconsin when it launched, and everyone I knew on the site was basically a

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google's encrypted search option. We wanted a way to ensure that every search our browsers sent was encrypted. At the same time, we were also able to encrypt most or all of the browser's communications with some other sites:
* Google Search
* Wikipedia
* Twitter and Identi.ca
* Facebook
* EFF and Tor
* Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, Scroogle and other small search engines
* and lots more!

This article needs a great big "citation needed" slapped on it. Yes, people need to think about what they post on the web, but no, that stuff will not stay around "forever." If anything, the web suffers from the opposite problem: memory loss.

"We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts....It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you."

Use a lot of thought and caution before posting to the web...it never forgets and is a critical part of what others may see about your one-time identity...even if it was 40 years ago!

Interesting article about how the Internet remembers everything we put in it and how it would be better both for us and our society if it forgot with time (like humans).

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from vi

How best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing—where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever.

thx, lg :) RT @AmirKassaei: Great Read! NYTimes: The Web Means the End of Forgetting http://nyti.ms/anOZh7

NYTimes: The Web Means the End of Forgetting http://nyti.ms/anOZh7

The digital age is facing its first existential crisis: the impossibility of erasing your posted past and moving on.

Privacy advocates fear that Foursquare, along with other geolocation apps such as Gowalla and Google Latitude, are vulnerable to "data scraping", namely, the sophisticated trawling and monitoring of user activity in an effort to build a rich database of personal information. The big worry, say critics, is who might get to make use of this information.